The lawsuit filed last week to halt the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development stands on a bedrock constitutional principle: “Congress, not the President or the U.S. Constitution, creates and organizes the offices and departments” of the government—as a 2017 Heritage Foundation report accurately stated.

Good-faith arguments exist both for and against America having an independent USAID, or—to name another Donald Trump target—a stand-alone federal Department of Education. Over the decades, Congress has changed its mind about both. Constitutionally, however, that’s the point: The decision is up to Congress. Unilateral moves to dismantle USAID, to mothball the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or, if Trump’s advisers have their way, to disassemble the Education Department are beyond the president’s constitutional authority.

Since the Kennedy administration, foreign-assistance functions have been lodged in different agency homes. With authority granted him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, President John F. Kennedy established USAID as a division of the State Department. Using powers delegated to him by statutes enacted in 1979, President Jimmy Carter moved USAID’s functions to the United States International Development Cooperation Agency. In 1998, Congress gave President Bill Clinton authority to either return USAID to the State Department or allow it to become an independent establishment within the executive branch; Clinton did the latter. Although presidential judgment thus informed the shape of USAID at every stage of its evolution, everything that presidents pre-Trump did with regard to the structure of USAID or the allocation of its functions was done pursuant to laws that Congress had enacted. No president asserted authority independent of Congress to create, reshape, or eliminate USAID.

This history reflects the Framers’ decision to give Congress, not the president, the authority to generate the executive-organization chart. The Constitution’s executive-branch charter, Article II, envisions what we now call the federal bureaucracy. The president is given explicit authority to “require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.” But Article II says nothing else about those “departments.” Instead, Article I of the Constitution, the charter for the legislative branch, assigns to Congress the responsibility to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution … all … powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” The president’s job is to faithfully execute the law, but law—including law that establishes and structures executive offices and agencies—gets made by Congress.

[Read: The other fear of the founders]

Since the very first Congress, the legislative branch has jealously guarded its power over organization. When the first House bill creating the Department of Foreign Affairs was introduced in the Senate, Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania suggested that the organization of the executive branch might be left to the president, as the holder of executive power. His scheme would have given to the president the power of a British monarch to create offices. The Senate rejected his position, and the First Congress enacted a round of statutes organizing the new departments—Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury. The statutory duties of the secretaries heading Foreign Affairs and War were largely to carry out presidential instructions; Congress recognized that Article II envisioned significant discretionary roles in foreign and military affairs for the president. The Treasury, however, was organized in detail. Not only did Congress assign the Treasury Secretary a significant number of specific legal duties, but it also created additional offices within the department—all requiring Senate advice and consent. These additional offices, as explained by the administrative-law scholar Jerry L. Mashaw, “were meant to provide checks on the Secretary and each other in the crucial matter of safeguarding the integrity of the fiscal and monetary affairs of the nation.” Congress went on to create a variety of other agencies, including the Mint, the Post Office, a Customs Service, and a national bank, tailoring the structure of each according to its sense of how best to fit structure to mission. No one doubted that this was Congress’s prerogative to decide.

Supreme Court jurisprudence recognized Congress’s role. In Myers v. United States, the 1926 Supreme Court decision most protective of broad presidential power over administration, Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft acknowledged: “To Congress under its legislative power is given the establishment of offices, the determination of their functions and jurisdiction, the prescribing of reasonable and relevant qualifications and rules of eligibility of appointees, and the fixing of the term for which they are to be appointed.” This proposition has never been open to serious question.

Congress has recognized, of course, that presidents may have valuable ideas regarding administrative organization. Beginning in 1939, Congress enacted a series of so-called Reorganization Acts, which gave presidents significant (but not unlimited) discretion to create, abolish, or restructure administrative agencies, subject to an important caveat. Presidential reorganization plans were subject to a “legislative veto”—that is, a resolution disapproving the plan enacted by both Houses of Congress, which could keep it from going into effect. This would be a concurrent resolution of the House and the Senate that the president could not veto and did not have to sign in order to make it binding. Through the threat of legislative vetoes, Congress kept control over what got created, abolished, or restructured.

In 1983, however, the Supreme Court held that legislative vetoes were an unconstitutional form of legislation. As a result, Congress took away presidential authority to implement reorganizations unilaterally. If presidential reorganization plans could not easily be blocked, Congress would no longer authorize them. Since 1984, presidents have been allowed only to propose reorganizations, which Congress could enact or reject through the ordinary legislative process. (A suggestion in 2023 by Vivek Ramaswamy that a 1977 Reorganization Act continues to empower presidents to abolish agencies despite the statutory changes Congress enacted in 1984 is an appallingly fanciful statutory interpretation.)

[Read: The Constitutional crisis is here]

In light of this legal background, the question is why Trump thinks a president can legally disassemble agencies on his own—assuming, that is, that he cares if it is legal. The likely answer would involve an especially ambitious version of an Article II interpretation called the “unitary executive theory.” The baseline premise of the unitary executive theory is that Article II guarantees presidents complete removal authority over every subordinate member of the executive branch. Bolder versions contend that he or she can also directly command how every function of the executive branch be performed—or even perform them personally.

The Supreme Court has never fully embraced the unitary executive theory. However, a broad reading of the Myers decision mentioned earlier—a reading the Court unanimously rejected seven years later—would invalidate any attempt by Congress to create independent administrators protected from presidential at-will removal. The Roberts Court has gone nearly all in on the broad reading of Myers, treating Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the 1935 opinion upholding the Federal Trade Commission, as a mere exception to Myers. (In the intervening decades, the Supreme Court had repeatedly reaffirmed Humphrey’s Executor as the controlling authority, most famously in its 1988 decision upholding the constitutionality of post-Watergate independent counsels.) As a result, the constitutionality of agency structures such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board now hangs by a thread; the Court could conceivably uphold the firing of the NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox.

Of course, even a presidential power to fire an individual agency head would not necessarily translate into authority to shut down entire government departments. However, in its 2024 opinion granting former presidents all-but-blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, the Court seemed to signal something far more ominous. The majority described the president’s authority to supervise the executive branch as a power that Congress may not touch—a conclusion that flies in the face of constitutional text. As explained by the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who had headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during part of George W. Bush’s second administration: “The ruling about the exclusivity of presidential enforcement discretion, especially vis-à-vis Congress, is entirely novel … And it has potentially massive implications, depending on its scope.” What the opinion now apparently implies to Trump is that the president, constitutionally speaking, is the entirety of the executive branch, and he can configure it however he wants.

That said, Trump’s record of legal success in the Supreme Court is a mixed one. But he presumably thinks it a good bet either that the legal challenges to his scorched-earth tactics will be too slow to stop him or that, if they reach the Supreme Court, that body’s right-wing supermajority will continue to improvise on behalf of de facto executive supremacy. Eyeing the latter possibility, the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has affirmed the administration’s position that Congress lacks authority to force the spending of appropriated funds—a position the Supreme Court has never endorsed, and which is constitutionally unfounded. But a majority that would proceed as vigorously and creatively as it did to protect Trump from prosecution might be willing to improvise some more.

[Read: Trump signals he might ignore the courts]

A government agency’s structure and location are not just abstract; they matter to the work the agency does on the ground. When Congress extracted a Department of Education from what was formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it was to give federal support for education greater emphasis. When Congress moved the Coast Guard from Transportation to Homeland Security, it was presumably to prioritize the Coast Guard’s role in security rather than safety. The reason proposals to merge the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service have always failed is that the organizational DNA of the Interior Department, which houses BLM, favors conservation, whereas the reflexive policy mood of the Agriculture Department, which owns the Forest Service, is pro-development.

Perhaps the most worrying development is that the administration’s commitment to obeying court orders may not prove any more reliable than its dedication to following statutes. On Sunday, with a soupçon of Trumpian deniability in his precise wording, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Taken literally, Vance’s statement is accurate; what it fails to acknowledge is that the judicial power includes authority to state just how far the executive’s legitimate power extends. In rejecting President Richard Nixon’s claim of entitlement to withhold the Watergate tapes, the Court held in a unanimous opinion: “Many decisions of this Court … have unequivocally reaffirmed the [1803] holding of Marbury v. Madison that ‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’” Should Trump ignore any court order to halt his demolition of the executive branch, he will have dismantled not just an agency, but the Constitution itself.

The Atlantic will expand its flagship event, The Atlantic Festival, to New York City for the first time this fall, and host a one-day festival event in Washington, D.C., this spring. The Atlantic Festival will take place from Thursday, September 18, to Saturday, September 20, and be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in downtown Manhattan, with other venues to be announced. Additionally, the event in D.C., On the Future, will be held Tuesday, April 29, at Planet Word. The speaker lineups are to be announced.

The expansion to New York City follows 16 years of The Atlantic Festival being held in Washington, D.C., and the growth of the event in scale, ambition, and attendance. The festival is the preeminent live exploration of The Atlantic’s journalism, bringing together more than 100 speakers to take part in events that examine the state of business and tech; culture and the arts; politics and democracy; and climate and health––all moderated by Atlantic journalists. The event will also host theatrical and musical performances, book talks with authors and essayists, exclusive film screenings, and podcast tapings.

Interviewees at the festival in recent years have included U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jamie Dimon, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Spike Lee, Kerry Washington, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nancy Pelosi, former Senator Mitt Romney, and dozens of sitting Cabinet secretaries, governors, and members of Congress. The festival has screened a number of films and series, including The Vietnam War, Boys State, and Lee, and featured live performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Yo-Yo Ma, Michael R. Jackson, and Chris Thile.

Candace Montgomery, executive vice president of AtlanticLive, says of the move: “We are thrilled to bring The Atlantic Festival to the cultural capital of the world. New York City is home to many Atlantic readers and subscribers and provides the festival with a global stage––giving us the opportunity to bring together fascinating speakers and build upon what has made the festival so successful.”

Last year was the third consecutive year that The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence by the National Magazine Awards; this year, the magazine is adding two more print issues, returning to monthly publication for the first time in more than two decades. The Atlantic is also hiring a number of writers and editors to grow its coverage of politics, defense, national security, and technology, in addition to health, science, and other areas.

The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Allstate, Destination DC, Genentech, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.

Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.

On the Future: An Atlantic Festival Event
April 29, 2025
D.C.’s Planet Word, and virtually

The Atlantic Festival
September 18–20, 2025
Perelman Performing Arts Center, and virtually

The founding generation’s fear of demagogues is well known. Alexander Hamilton insisted on the problem in Federalist No. 1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” The Founders’ concern was really two fears combined: fear of an unscrupulous leader and fear of an unreflective people. What is less well known is that they also feared a third source of power that could damage their grand experiment in popular government: extraordinarily rich Americans whose aims did not align with democracy. With America’s most prominent billionaires lining up to pay homage to Donald Trump at his inauguration, and in particular with the power granted to Elon Musk to make the government more “efficient,” the country is witnessing these three fears come together: a demagogue who unites the self-interested rich with the politically ignorant.

As a first step to protect against this sort of alliance, America’s republican political institutions rejected the built-in privileges of aristocracy. Thomas Jefferson, then a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, wrote legislation that abolished primogeniture and entail—property laws inherited from monarchical and aristocratic England that advantaged “an aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” entrenching a sense of social and political privilege.

Similarly, Gouverneur Morris, the Founder who drafted the actual text of the Constitution, worried at the Constitutional Convention that “the schemes of the rich” would take advantage of the passions of the people, resulting in “a violent aristocracy, or a more violent despotism.” Morris insisted that the “rich will strive to establish their dominion,” and even considered designing a Senate populated by the established and propertied to balance the more democratic and popular House. The two classes, he reasoned, reflected in two different institutions, would contain each other. Although the Constitution did not embrace institutional class divisions, it did formally prohibit the granting of titles of nobility as a hedge against rule by the few. Yet even in a wholly republican and popular government, fears that concentrated wealth would enable the rich to have a predominant position in political life persisted.

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

The remedy, many Founders believed, was a broad economic distribution among the middle class, avoiding established classes of both rich and poor and the conflict that inescapably came along with it. Defending the Constitution in “Federalist No. 10,” Madison acknowledged that “the various and unequal distribution of property” is the most durable source of political conflict, but argued that a large republic would inevitably include a great diversity of property and economic interests. Conflict within a dynamic political economy would be between different and diverse property interests, which would fluctuate and change based on different issues, making a permanent wealthy class less likely. Noah Webster echoed this thinking in a lesser-known defense of the Constitution and the logic it rested on. A political and educational thinker famous for his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language, Webster wrote forcefully on his belief that democracy depended on the middle class and could not survive highly concentrated wealth: “an equality of property … constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.” Webster observed that, historically speaking, “the power of the people has increased in an exact proportion to their acquisitions of property,” but when wealthy people centralize power, “liberty expires” and republican government tends toward oligarchy.

If the problem of wealth in politics has been present from the beginning, it has been particularly acute since the Supreme Court’s opinion in Citizens United in 2010, which unleashed an unprecedented flood of money into our politics, to both parties. Yet the generic problem of money in elections doesn’t capture what is happening right now: The country faces an alliance of self-interested would-be oligarchs and a president who has little commitment to constitutional democracy. Their interests are not the public’s, and their power is immense.

Elon Musk is the most obvious instance of this. He has been appointed by Trump to head the Department of Government Efficiency, where he aims to cut $500 billion in government spending and reorganize the federal bureaucracy. DOGE’s remit is to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. Government can always be made more efficient. Yet Musk, whose companies have billions of dollars in government subsidies and contracts, seems to be engaged in “a bureaucratic coup.” He gained access to the Treasury’s payment system and halted operations at USAID; he is reportedly behind the attempted “buyout” of government employees, and his team has perhaps unlawfully accessed government employees’ private information. And despite the enormous conflicts of interest posed by his other businesses, he has not relinquished them even while wielding extraordinary governmental power (very much like Trump). The setup could allow Musk, again like Trump, to profit from his connections and potentially steer the government toward his financial interests and away from competitors’.

Beyond Musk, Trump has named a number of ultra-wealthy allies to his Cabinet, including the secretaries of the Treasury, commerce, and education. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have also signaled their support, with their respective companies donating to Trump’s inauguration and making business accommodations that seem aimed to please Trump. At the top of Trump’s agenda in the new Congress is extending his 2017 tax cuts, which will largely benefit the very well-off.

Trump openly rejected the basic rules of the constitutional order by refusing to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 presidential election, scheming to remain in office, pardoning those who aided him in his effort to overturn the Constitution, and promising political retribution on those who tried to hold him accountable. His wealthy backers are either indifferent to this threat or eager to indulge it, thinking they are beyond rules.

[Read: The unique danger of a Trumpist oligarchy]

This combination is the embodiment of Hamilton’s warning in “Federalist No. 71” that the people are continually beset by “the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” A demagogue with contempt for the Constitution, colluding with many of the wealthiest Americans on the promise that their wealth will be translated into political power and favors is just the sort of alliance that the Founders warned would corrupt popular government: that “the people,” in Madison’s phrase, “would be misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.”

Writing to Jefferson, John Adams foresaw many of today’s problems: The people would inevitably confuse the rich and well-born for the wise and virtuous. If Jefferson contemplated the rise of a “natural aristocracy,” Adams reminded him that mankind had long admired the rich simply because they were rich, confusing their wealth for wisdom. Yet wealth is no guarantor of wisdom or virtue. A combination of the rich and the ignorant, Adams noted, could empower a demagogue at the expense of democracy.

Americans too often think they are exceptional, that history somehow does not apply to them. Adams disabused us of this notion from the beginning. There “is no special providence for Americans”; we are no different than other nations. We, too, might end our republican experiment by trusting in a demagogue urged on by our emerging oligarchs.